I've read two books by Katrina Leno before (Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once), and I thought they were beautiful. They both dealt with really tough subjects and made me tear up more than once, but they were also very life-affirming somehow. So when a friend lent me You Must Not Miss saying she thought I might like it, I expected to like it indeed, and I expected it to make me feel roughly the same way as the author's other books did.

I... was wrong, I guess.

I did like a lot about this book. I liked the characterization. I loved Leno's prose. I liked big parts of how the story was constructed, gradually revealing the truth about what had happened in Magpie's life. I didn't exactly like (because this isn't the sort of thing I can apply the word "like" to) but I was genuinely impressed by the visceral honesty of depicting the impact abuse and neglect have on people. I really felt for Magpie. I wanted some sort of victory for her. I wanted a chance for her to get better.

Instead, it felt like I only got to witness her defeat.

I also wasn't a fan of how the whole Near plotline was handled on the whole. In magical realism books like this, I expect to see a sort of ambiguity: "Is this real, or is this only happening in the character's head?" Here, this ambiguity was handled in a pretty weird way for me. On one hand, I felt like I was expected to immediately buy it that Near is completely, 100% real. On the other hand, for at least the first 2/3 of the book there was preciously little reason to actually think so, if I looked closely at the actual events. I don't know, it was like I expected a soft shadow play and got stark contrasts, and it only served to magnify that feeling I talked about in the paragraph under the spoiler above. 

Bottom line: I felt like this ended up being a story about the abusers winning, despite the successful revenge and the supposed empowerment the MC got, and I didn't like that.